|
We have lost the first skirmish in the campaign, but we are full
of
hope, for timber has arrived at last, and from the carpenter's
bench
under the pear tree there comes the sound of saw, hammer, and
plane,
and before nightfall there will be a hive in hand for the morrow. And
it
never rains but it pours--here is a telegram telling us of three
hives
on the way. Now for a counter-offensive of artificial swarms. We
will
harvest our loads of hay before they take wing.
[Illustration:
0090]
[Illustration: 0091]
YOUNG AMERICA
|If
you want to understand America," said my host, "come and see
her young
barbarians at play. To-morrow Harvard meets Princeton at
Princeton. It will
be a great game. Come and see it."
He was a Harvard man himself, and
spoke with the light of assured
victory in his eyes. This was the first match
since the war, but
consider the record of the two Universities in the past.
Harvard was
as much ahead of Princeton on the football field as Oxford was
ahead of
Cambridge on the river. And I went to share his anticipated triumph.
It
was like a Derby Day at the Pennsylvania terminus at New York. From
the
great hall of that magnificent edifice a mighty throng of
fur-coated
men and women, wearing the favours of the rival colleges--yellow
for
Princeton and red for Harvard--passed through the gateways to
the
platform, filling train after train, that dipped under the Hudson
and,
coming out into the sunlight on the other side of the river,
thundered
away with its jolly load of revellers over the brown New Jersey
country,
through historic Trenton and on by woodland and farm to the
far-off
towers of Princeton.
And there, under the noble trees, and in
the quads and the colleges,
such a mob of men and women, young and old and
middle-aged, such
"how-d'ye-do's" and greetings, such meetings and
recollections of old
times and ancient matches, such hurryings and scurryings
to see familiar
haunts, class-room, library, chapel, refectories, everything
treasured
in the memory. Then off to the Stadium. There it rises like
some
terrific memorial of antiquity--seen from without a mighty circular
wall
of masonry, sixty or seventy feet high; seen from within a great
oval,
or rather horseshoe, of humanity, rising tier above tier from
the
level of the playground to the top of the giddy wall. Forty
thousand
spectators--on this side of the horseshoe, the reds; on the other
side,
with the sunlight full upon them, the yellows.
Down between the
rival hosts, and almost encircled, by them, the empty
playground, with its
elaborate whitewash markings---for this American
game is much more
complicated than English Rugger--its goal-posts and
its elaborate scoring
boards that with their ten-foot letters keep up a
minute record of the
game.
The air hums with the buzz of forty thousand tongues. Through the
buzz
there crashes the sound of approaching music, martial music,
challenging
music, and the band of the Princeton men, with the undergrads
marching
like soldiers to the battlefield, emerges round the Princeton end of
the
horseshoe, and takes its place on the bottom rank of the Princeton
host
opposite. Terrific cheers from the enemy.
Another crash of music,
and from our end of the horseshoe comes the
Harvard band, with its tail of
undergrads, to face the enemy across the
greensward. Terrific cheers from
ourselves.
The fateful hour is imminent. It is time to unleash the dogs
of war.
Three flannelled figures leap out in front of the Princeton host.
They
shout through megaphones to the enemy. They rush up and down the
line,
they wave their arms furiously in time, they leap into the air. And
with
that leap there bursts from twenty thousand throats a barbaric chorus
of
cheers roared in unison and in perfect time, shot through with
strange,
demoniacal yells, and culminating in a gigantic bass growl, like
that of
a tiger, twenty thousand tigers leaping on their prey--the growl
rising
to a terrific snarl that rends the heavens.
The glove is thrown
down. We take it up. We send back yell for yell,
roar for roar. Three
cheerleaders leap out on the greensward in front of
us, and to their screams
of command and to the wild gyrations of their
limbs we stand up and shout the
battle-cry of Harvard. What it is like I
cannot hear, for I am lost in its
roar. Then the band opposite leads off
with the battle-song of Princeton,
and, thrown out by twenty thousand
lusty pairs of lungs, it hits us like a
Niagara of sound. But, unafraid,
we rise like one man and, led by our band
and kept in time by our
cheer-leaders, gesticulating before us on the
greensward like mad
dervishes, we shout back the song of "Har-vard!
Har-vard!"
And now, from underneath the Stadium, on either side there
bound into
the field two fearsome groups of gladiators, this clothed in
crimson,
that in the yellow and black stripes of the tiger, both padded
and
helmeted so that they resemble some strange primeval animal of
gigantic
muscular development and horrific visage. At their entrance
the
megaphones opposite are heard again, and the enemy host rises
and
repeats its wonderful cheer and tiger growl. We rise and heave
the
challenge back. And now the teams are in position, the front lines,
with
the ball between, crouching on the ground for the spring. In the
silence
that has suddenly fallen on the scene, one hears short, sharp cries
of
numbers. "Five!" "Eleven!" "Three!" "Six!" "Ten!" like the rattle
of
musketry. Then--crash! The front lines have leapt on each other.
There
is a frenzied swirl of arms and legs and bodies. The swirl clears
and
men are seen lying about all over the line as though a shell had
burst
in their midst, while away to the right a man with the ball is
brought
down with a crash to the ground by another, who leaps at him like
a
projectile that completes its trajectory at his ankles.
I will not
pretend to describe what happened during the next ninety
thrilling
minutes--which, with intervals and stoppages for the
attentions of the
doctors, panned out to some two hours--how the battle
surged to and fro, how
the sides strained and strained until the tension
of their muscles made your
own muscles ache in sympathy, how Harvard
scored a try and our cheer-leaders
leapt out and led us in a psalm of
victory, how Princeton drew level--a
cyclone from the other side!--and
forged ahead--another cyclone--how man
after man went down like an ox,
was examined by the doctors and led away or
carried away; how another
brave in crimson or yellow leapt into the breach;
how at last hardly a
man of the original teams was left on the field; how at
every convenient
interval the Princeton host rose and roared at us and how we
jumped up
and roared at them; how Harvard scored again just on time; how the
match
ended in a draw and so deprived us of the great carnival of victory
that
is the crowning frenzy of these classic encounters--all this is
recorded
in columns and pages of the American newspapers and lives in my mind
as
a jolly whirlwind, a tempestuous "rag" in which young and old,
gravity
and gaiety, frantic fun and frantic fury, were amazingly
confounded.
"And what did you think of it?" asked my host as we rattled
back to New
York in the darkness that night. "I think it has helped me to
understand
America," I replied. And I meant it, even though I could not
have
explained to him, or even to myself all that I
meant.
[Illustration: 0095]
[Illustration:
0096]
ON GREAT REPLIES
|At a dinner table the other
night, the talk turned upon a certain
politician whose cynical traffic in
principles and loyalties has
eclipsed even the record of Wedderbum or John
Churchhil. There was one
defender, an amiable and rather portentous gentleman
who did not so much
talk as lecture, and whose habit of looking up
abstractedly and fixedly
at some invisible altitude gave him the impression
of communing with the
Almighty. He was profuse in his admissions and
apologies, but he wound
up triumphantly with the remark:
"But, after
all, you must admit that he is a person of genius."
"So was Madame de
Pompadour," said a voice from the other side of the
table.
It was a
devastating retort, swift, unexpected, final. Like all good
replies it had
many facets. It lit up the character of the politician
with a comparison of
rare wit and truth. He was the courtesan of
democracy who, like the courtesan
of the King, trafficked sacred things
for ambition and power, and brought
ruin in his train. It ran through
the dull, solemn man on the other side of
the table like a rapier. There
was no reply. There was nothing to reply to.
You cannot reply to a flash
of lightning. It revealed the speaker himself.
Here was a swift,
searching intelligence, equipped with a weapon of tempered
steel that
went with deadly certainty to the heart of truth. Above all, it
flashed
on the whole landscape of discussion a fresh and clarify ing light
that
gave it larger significance and range.
It is the character of all
great replies to have this various glamour
and finality. They are not of the
stuff of argument. They have the
absoluteness of revelation. They illuminate
both subject and
personality. There are men we know intimately simply by some
lightning
phrase that has leapt from their lips at the challenge of
fundamental
things. I do not know much about the military genius or the deeds
of
Augureau, but I know the man by that terrible reply he made to
Napoleon
about the celebration at Notre Dame which revealed the
imperial
ambitions of the First Consul. Bonaparte asked Augureau what he
thought
of the ceremony. "Oh, it was very fine," replied the general; "there
was
nothing wanting, _except the million of men who have perished in
pulling
down what you are setting up_."
And in the same way Luther
lives immortally in that shattering reply to
the Cardinal legate at Augsburg.
The Cardinal had been sent from Rome to
make him recant by hook or by crook.
Remonstrances, threats, entreaties,
bribes were tried. Hopes of high
distinction and reward were held out to
him if he would only be reasonable.
To the amazement of the proud
Italian, a poor peasant's son--a miserable
friar of a country town--was
prepared to defy the power and resist the
prayers of the Sovereign of
Christendom.
"What!" said the Cardinal at
last to him, "do you think the Pope cares
for the opinion of a German boor?
The Pope's little finger is stronger
than all Germany. Do you expect your
princes to take up arms to defend
_you--you_, a wretched worm like you? I
tell you, no! And where will you
be then--where will you be
then?"
"Then, as now," replied Luther. "Then, as now, in the hands of
Almighty
God."
Not less magnificent was the reply of Thomas
Paine to the bishop. The
venom and malice of the ignorant and intolerant
have, for more than a
century, poisoned the name and reputation of that great
man--one of the
profoundest political thinkers and one of the most saintly
men this
country has produced, the friend and secretary of Washington,
the
brilliant author of the papers on "The Crisis," that kept the flame
of
the rebellion high in the darkest hour, the first Foreign Secretary
of
the United States, the man to whom Lafayette handed the key of
the
Bastille for presentation to Washington. The true character of
this
great Englishman flashes out in his immortal reply. The bishop
had
discoursed "On the goodness of God in making both rich and poor."
And
Paine answered, "God did not make rich and poor. God made male
and
female and gave the earth for their inheritance."
It is
not often that a great reply is enveloped with humour. Lincoln had
this rare
gift, perhaps, beyond all other men. One does not know whether
to admire most
the fun or the searching truth of the reply recorded by
Lord Lyons, who had
called on the President and found him blacking his
boots. He expressed a not
unnatural surprise at the occupation, and
remarked that people in England did
not black their own boots. "Indeed,"
said the President. "Then whose boots do
they black?" There was the same
mingling of humour and wisdom in his reply to
the lady who anxiously
inquired whether he thought the Lord was on their
side. "I do not know,
madam," he said, "but I hope that we are on the Lord's
side."
And with what homely humour he clothed that magnanimous reply to
Raymond
when the famous editor, like so many other supporters, urged him
to
dismiss Chase, his Secretary of the Treasury, who had been
consistently
disloyal to him and was now his open rival for the Presidency,
and was
using his department to further his ambitions. "Raymond," he said,
"you
were brought up on a farm, weren't you? Then you know what a 'chin
fly'
is. My brother and I were once ploughing on a Kentucky farm, I
driving
the horse and he holding the plough. The horse was lazy; but once
he
rushed across the field so that I, with my long legs, could
scarcely
keep pace with him. On reaching the end of the furrow, I found
an
enormous chin fly fastened upon him and I knocked him off. My
brother
asked me what I did that for. I told him I didn't want the old
horse
bitten in that way. 'Why,' said my brother, 'that's all that made
him
go!' Now, if Mr Chase has got a presidential 'chin-fly' biting him,
I'm
not going to knock it off, if it will only make his department _go!_"
If
one were asked to name the most famous answer in history, one might,
not
unreasonably, give the palm to a woman--a poor woman, too, who has
been
dust for three thousand years, whose very name is unknown; but who
spoke
six words that gave her immortality. They have been recalled
on
thousands of occasions and in all lands, but never more memorably
than
by John Bright when he was speaking of the hesitation with which
he
accepted cabinet office: "I should have preferred much," he said,
"to
have remained in the common rank of citizenship in which heretofore
I
have lived. There is a passage in the Old Testament that has
often
struck me as being one of great beauty. Many of you will recollect
that
the prophet, in journeying to and fro, was very hospitably
entertained
by a Shunamite woman. In return, he wished to make her some
amends, and
he called her to him and asked her what there was he should do
for her.
'Shall I speak for thee to the King?' he said, 'or to the captain of
the
host.' Now, it has always appeared to me that the Shunamite
woman
returned a great answer. She replied, in declining the prophet's
offer,
'I dwell among mine own people.'"
It is the quality of a great
reply that it does not so much answer the
point as obliterate it. It is the
thunder of Sinai breaking in on the
babble of vulgar minds. The current of
thought is changed, as if
by magic, from mean things to sublime things, from
the gross to the
spiritual, from the trivial to the enduring. Clever replies,
witty
replies, are another matter. Anybody can make them with a
sharp
tongue and a quick mind. But great replies are not dependent on wit
or
cleverness. If they were Cicero would have made many, whereas he
never
made one. His repartees are perfect of their kind, but they belong
to
the debating club and the law court. They raise a laugh and score
a
point, but they are summer lightnings. The great reply does not
come
from witty minds, but from rare and profound souls. The
brilliant
adventurer, Napoleon, could no more have made that reply of
Augereau
than a rabbit could play Bach. He could not have made it because
with
all his genius he was as soulless a man as ever played a great part
on
the world's stage.
[Illustration: 0101]
[Illustration:
0102]
ON BOILERS AND BUTTERFLIES
|I went recently to
an industrial town in the North on some business,
and while there had
occasion to meet a man who manufactured boilers and
engines and machinery of
all sorts. He talked to me about boilers
and engines and machinery of all
sorts, and I did my best to appear
interested and understanding. But I was
neither one nor the other. I was
only bored. Boilers and engines, I know, are
important things. Compared
with a boiler, the finest lyric that was ever
written is only a perfume
on the gale. There is a practical downrightness
about a boiler that
makes "Drink to me only with thine eyes," or "O mistress
mine, where are
you roaming?" or even "Twelfth Night" itself, a mere idle
frivolity.
All you can say in favour of "Twelfth Night," from the strictly
business
point of view, is that it doesn't wear out, and the boiler does.
Thank
heaven for that.
But though boilers and engines are undoubtedly
important things, I can
never feel any enthusiasm about them. I know I ought
to. I know I ought
to be grateful to them for all the privileges they confer
on me. How,
for example, could I have gone to that distant town without the
help of
a boiler? How--and this was still more important--how could I
hope
to get away from that distant town without the help of a boiler?
But
gratitude will not keep pace with obligation, and the fact remains
that
great as my debt is to machinery, I dislike personal contact with
it
as much as I dislike the east wind. It gives the same feeling of
arid
discomfort, of mental depression, of spiritual bleakness. It has
no
bowels of compassion. It is power divorced from feeling and is
the
symbol of brute force in a world that lives or perishes by its
emotional
values. In Dante's "Inferno" each sinner had a hell peculiarly
adapted
to give him the maximum of misery. He would have reserved a
machine-room
for me, and there I should have wandered forlornly for ever and
ever
among wheels and pulleys and piston-rods and boilers, vainly
trying
amidst the thud and din of machinery and the nauseous reek of
oily
"waste" to catch those perfumes on the gale, those frivolous
rhythms
to which I had devoted so much of that life' which should be "real
and
earnest" and occupied with serious things like boilers. And so it
came
about that as my friend talked I spiritually wilted away.
I did
not seem to be listening to a man. I seemed to be listening to a
learned and
articulate boiler.
Then something happened. I do not recall what it was;
but it led from
boilers to butterflies. The transition seems a little violent
and
inexplicable. The only connection I can see is that there is a "b"
in
boilers and a "b" in butterflies. But, whatever the cause, the
effect
was miraculous. The articulate boiler became suddenly a flaming
spirit.
The light of passion shone in his eyes. He no longer looked at me as
if
I were a fellow-boiler; but as if I were his long-lost and
dearly-loved
brother. Was I interested in butterflies? Then away with
boilers! Come,
I must see his butterflies. And off we went as fast as petrol
could
whisk us to his house in the suburbs, and there in a great
room,
surrounded with hundreds of cases and drawers, I saw butterflies
from
the ends of the earth, butterflies from the forests of Brazil
and
butterflies from the plains of India, and butterflies from the veldt
of
South Africa and butterflies from the bush of Australia, all
arranged
in the foliage natural to their habitat to show how their scheme
of
coloration conformed to their setting. Some of them had their
wings
folded back and were indistinguishable from the leaves among which
they
lay. And as my friend, with growing excitement, revealed his
treasure,
he talked of his adventures in the pursuit of them, and of the law
of
natural selection and all its bearing upon the mystery of life,
its
survivals and its failures. This hobby of his was, in short, the
key
of his world. The boiler house was the prison where he did time. At
the
magic word "butterflies" the prison door opened, and out he sailed
on
the wings of passion in pursuit of the things of the mind.
There
are some people who speak slightingly of hobbies as if they were
something
childish and frivolous. But a man without a hobby is like a
ship without a
rudder. Life is such a tumultuous and confused affair
that most of us get
lost in the tangle and brushwood and get to the
end of the journey without
ever having found a path and a sense of
direction. But a hobby hits the path
at once. It may be ever so trivial
a thing, but it supplies what the mind
needs, a disinterested enthusiasm
outside the mere routine of work and play.
You cannot tell where it
will lead. You may begin with stamps, and find you
are thinking in
continents. You may collect coins, and find that the history
of man is
written on them. You may begin with bees, and end with the science
of
life. Ruskin began with pictures and found they led to economics
and
everything else. For as every road was said to lead to Rome, so
every
hobby leads out into the universe, and supplies us with a
compass
for the adventure. It saves us from the humiliation of being
merely
smatterers. We cannot help being smatterers in general, for the
world
is too full of things to permit us to be anything else, but one
field
of intensive culture will give even our smattering a
respectable
foundation.
It will do more. It will save our smattering
from folly. No man who
knows even one subject well, will ever be quite such a
fool as he might
be when he comes to subjects he does not know. He will know
he does not
know them and that is the beginning of wisdom. He will have a
scale of
measurement which will enable him to take soundings in strange
waters.
He will have, above all, an attachment to life which will make him
at
home in the world. Most of us need some such anchorage. We are
plunged
into this bewildering whirlpool of consciousness to be the sport
of
circumstance. We have in us the genius of speculation, but the
further
our speculations penetrate the profounder becomes the mystery
that
baffles us. We are caught in the toils of affections that crumble
to
dust, indoctrinated with creeds that wither like grass, beaten about
by
storms that shatter our stoutest battlements like spray blown upon
the
wind. In the end, we suspect that we are little more than dreams
within
a dream--or as Carlyle puts it, "exhalations that are and then are
not."
And we share the poet's sense of exile--=
```In this house with
starry dome,
````Floored with gem-like lakes and seas,
```Shall I
never be at home?
````Never wholly at my ease?=
From this
spiritual loneliness there are various ways of escape, from
stoicism to
hedonism, but one of the most rational and kindly is the
hobby. It brings us
back from the perplexing conundrum of life to things
that we can see and
grasp and live with cheerfully and companionably and
without fear of
bereavement or disillusion. We cultivate our garden and
find in it a modest
answer to our questions. We see the seasons come
and go like old friends
whose visits may be fleeting, but are always
renewed. Or we make friends in
books, and live in easy comradeship with
Horace or Pepys or Johnson in some
static past that is untouched by the
sense of the mortality of things. Or we
find in music or art a garden
of the mind, self-contained and self-sufficing,
in which the anarchy of
intractible circumstance is subdued to an inner
harmony that calms the
spirit and endows it with more sovereign vision. The
old gentleman
in "Romany Rye," you will remember, found his deliverance in
studying
Chinese. His bereavement had left him without God and without hope
in
the world, without any refuge except the pitiful contemplation of
the
things that reminded him of his sorrow. One day he sat gazing
vacantly
before him, when his eye fell upon some strange marks on a teapot,
and
he thought he heard a voice say, "The marks! the marks! cling to
the
marks! or-----" And from this beginning--but the story is too
fruity,
too rich with the vintage of Borrow to be mutilated. Take the
book
down, turn to the episode, and thank me for sending you again into
the
enchanted Borrovian realm that is so unlike anything else to be found
in
books. It is enough for the purpose here to recall this perfect
example
of the healing power of the hobby. It gives us an intelligible
little
world of our own where we can be at ease, and from whose warmth
and
friendliness we can look out on the vast conundrum without expecting
an
answer or being much troubled because we do not get one. It was a
hobby
that poor Pascal needed to allay that horror of the universe which
he
expressed in the desolating phrase, "Le silence etemel de ces
espaces
infinis m'effraie." For on the wings of the butterfly one can not
only
outrange the boiler, but can adventure into the infinite in the
spirit
of happy and confident adventure.
[Illustration:
0108]
[Illustration: 0109]
ON HEREFORD
BEACON
|Jenny Lind sleeps in Malvern Priory Church; but Wynd's Point
where she
died is four miles away up on the hills, in the middle of that
noble
range of the Malverns that marches north and south from Worcester
beacon
to Gloucester beacon.
It lies just where the white ribbon of
road that has wound its way
up from Malvern reaches the slopes of Hereford
beacon, and begins its
descent into the fat pastures and deep woodlands of
the Herefordshire
country.
Across the dip in the road Hereford beacon,
the central point of the
range, rises in gracious treeless curves, its summit
ringed with the
deep trenches from whence, perhaps on some such cloudless day
as
this, the Britons scanned the wide plain for the approach of the
Roman
legions. Caractacus himself is credited with fortifying these
natural
ramparts; but the point is doubtful. There are those who attribute
the
work to----. But let the cabman who brought me up to Wynd's Point
tell
his own story.
He was a delightful fellow, full of geniality and
information which he
conveyed in that rich accent of Worcestershire that has
the strength of
the north without its harshness and the melody of the south
without its
slackness. He had also that delicious haziness about the history
of
the district which is characteristic of the native. As we walked up
the
steep road side by side by the horse's head he pointed out the
Cotswolds,
Gloucester Cathedral, Worcester Cathedral, the Severn and
the other features
of the ever widening landscape. Turning a bend in the
road, Hereford beacon
came in view.
"That's where Cromwell wur killed, sir."
He spoke
with the calm matter-of-factness of a guide-book.
"Killed?" said I, a
little stunned.
"Yes, sir, he wur killed hereabouts. He fought th' battle
o' Worcester
from about here you know, sir."
"But he came from the
north to Worcester, and this is south. And he
wasn't killed at all. He died
in his bed."
The cabman yielded the point without
resentment.
"Well, sir, happen he wur only captured. I've heard folks say
he wur
captured in a cave on Hereford beacon. The cave's there now. I've
never
sin it, but it's there. I used to live o'er in Radnorshire and
heard
tell as he wur captured in a cave on Hereford beacon."
He was
resolute on the point of capture. The killing was a detail; but
the capture
was vital. To surrender that would be to surrender the whole
Cromwellian
legend. There is a point at which the Higher Criticism must
be fought
unflinchingly if faith is not to crumble utterly away.
"He wur a
desperate mischieful man wur Cromwell," he went on. "He blowed
away Little
Malvern Church down yonder."
He pointed down into the woody hollow below
where an ancient tower was
visible amid the rich foliage. Little Malvern
Priory! Here was historic
ground indeed, and I thought of John Inglesant and
of the vision of
Piers Plowman as he lay by the little rivulet in the
Malverns.
"Left the tower standing he did, sir," pursued the historian.
"Now, why
should th' old varmint a' left th' tower standing, sir?"
And
the consideration of this problem of Cromwellian psychology brought
us to
Wynd's Point.
The day before our arrival there had been a visitor to the
house, an
old gentleman who had wandered in the grounds and sat and mused in
the
little arbour that Jenny Lind built, and whence she used to look
out
on the beacon and across the plain to the Cots-wolds. He had
gently
declined to go inside the house. There are some memories too
sacred
to disturb. It was the long widowed husband of the Swedish saint
and
singer.
It is all as she made it and left it. There hangs about it
the sense of
a vanished hand, of a gracious spirit. The porch, with its deep,
sloping
roof, and its pillars of untrimmed silver birch, suggesting a
mountain
chalet, "the golden cage," of the singer fronting the
drawing-room
bowered in ivy, the many gables, the quaint furniture, and the
quainter
pictures of saints, that hang upon the walls--all speak with
mute
eloquence of the peasant girl whose voice thrilled two
hemispheres,
whose life was an anthem, and whose magic still lingers in the
sweet
simplicity of her name.
"Why did you leave the stage?" asked a
friend of Jenny Lind, wondering,
like all the world, why the incomparable
actress and singer should
surrender, almost in her youth, the intoxicating
triumphs of opera for
the sober role of a concert singer, singing not for
herself, but for
charity.
Jenny Lind sat with her Lutheran Bible on
her knee.
"Because," she said, touching the Bible, "it left me so little
time for
this, and" (looking at the sunset) "none for that."
There is
the secret of Jenny Lind's love for Wynd's Point, where the
cuckoo--his voice
failing slightly in these hot June days--wakes you in
the rosy dawn and
continues with unwearied iteration until the shadows
lengthen across the
lawn, and the Black Mountains stand out darkly
against the sunset, and the
lights of Gloucester shine dimly in the
deepening gloom of the vast
plain.
Jenny Lind was a child of Nature to the end, and Wynd's Point is
Nature
unadorned. It stands on a woody rock that drops almost sheer to
the
road, with mossy ways that wind through the larches the furze and
the
broom to the top, where the wind blows fresh from the sea, and you
come
out on the path of spongy turf that invites you on and on over
the
green summits that march in stately Indian file to the shapely peak
of
Worcester beacon.
Whether you go north to Worcester beacon or south
over Hereford beacon
to Gloucester beacon, there is no finer walk in England
than along these
ten miles of breezy highlands, with fifteen English counties
unrolled
at your feet, the swifts wheeling around your path and that sense
of
exhilaration that comes from the spacious solitude of high places.
It
is a cheerful solitude, too, for if you tire of your own thoughts and
of
the twin shout of the cuckoo you may fling yourself down on the turf
and
look out over half of busy England from where, beyond 'the Lickey
Hills,
Birmingham stains the horizon with its fuliginous activities to
where
southward the shining pathway of the Bristol Channel carries
the
imagination away with Sebastian Cabot to the Spanish main. Here
you
may see our rough island story traced in characters of city, hill,
and
plain. These grass-grown trenches, where to-day the young lambs
are
grazing, take us back to the dawn of things and the beginnings of
that
ancient tragedy of the Celtic race. Yonder, enveloped in a thin veil
of
smoke, is Tewkesbury, and to see Tewkesbury is to think of the Wars
of
the Roses, of "false, fleeting, perjured Clarence that stabbed me on
the
field at Tewkesbury," and of Ancient Pistol, whose "wits were thick
as
Tewkesbury mustard." There is the battlefield of Mortimer's Cross,
and
far away Edgehill carries the mind forward to the beginning of
that
great struggle for a free England which finished yonder at
Worcester,
where the clash of arms was heard for the last time in our land
and
where Cromwell sheathed his terrible sword for ever.
The sun has
left the eastern slopes and night is already beginning to
cast its shadows
over Little Malvern and the golf links beyond, and the
wide plain where
trails of white smoke show the pathway of trains racing
here through the
tunnel to Hereford, there to Gloucester, and yonder to
Oxford and London. The
labourer is leaving the fields and the cattle are
coming up from the
pastures. The landscape fades into mystery and gloom.
Now is the moment to
turn westward, where=
````Vanquished eve, as night
prevails,
````Bleeds upon the road to Wales.=
All the landscape is
bathed with the splendour of the setting sun,
and in the mellow radiance the
Welsh mountains stand out like the
far battlements of fairyland. Eastnor
Castle gleams like a palace of
alabaster, and in the woods of the castle that
clothe these western
slopes a pheasant rends the golden silence with the
startled noise and
flurry of its flight.
The magic passes. The cloud
palaces of the west turn from gold to grey;
the fairy battlements are
captured by the invading night, the wind turns
suddenly chill, the moon is up
over the Cotswolds. It is time to go....
Down in the garden at Wynd's
Point a rabbit scurries across the lawn and
a late cuckoo returning from the
hills sends a last shout through
the twilight. The songs of the day are done.
I stand under the great
sycamore by the porch where through the hot hours the
chorus of myriads
of insects has sounded like the ceaseless note of a cello
drawn by an
unfaltering bow. The chorus has ceased. The birds have vanished,
all
save a pied wagtail, loveliest of a lovely tribe, that flirts
its
graceful tail by the rowan tree. From the midst of the foliage
come
those intimate murmurs of the birds, half chatter, half song, that
close
the day. Even these grow few and faint until the silence is
unbroken.=
``And the birds and the beasts and the insects are
drowned,
``In an ocean of dreams without a sound.=
Overhead the
sky is strewn with stars. Night and silence have
triumphed.
[Illustration: 0115]
[Illustration:
0116]
CHUM
|When I turned the key in the door and
entered the cottage, I missed a
familiar sound. It was the "thump, thump,
thump," of a tail on the floor
at the foot of the stairs. I turned on the
light. Yes, the place
was vacant. Chum had gone, and he would not return. I
knew that the
veterinary must have called, pronounced his case hopeless, and
taken him
away, and that I should hear no more his "welcome home!" at
midnight. No
matter what the labours of the day had been or how profound his
sleep,
he never failed to give me a cheer with the stump of his tail and
to
blink his eyes sleepily as I gave him "Good dog" and a pat on the
head.
Then with a huge sigh of content he would lapse back into
slumber,
satisfied that the last duty of the day was done, and that all was
well
with the world for the night. Now he has lapsed into sleep
altogether.
I think that instead of going into the beech woods this
morning I will
pay my old friend a little tribute at parting. It will ease my
mind, and
in any case I should find the woods lonely to-day, for it was there
that
I enjoyed his companionship most. And it was there, I think, that
he
enjoyed my companionship most also. He was a little particular with
whom
he went, and I fancy he preferred me to anybody. Children he declined
to
go with, unless they were accompanied by a responsible grown-up
person.
It was not that he did not love children. When little Peggy
returned
after a longish absence his transports of joy knew no bounds. He
would
leap round and round in wild circles culminating in an embrace that
sent
her to the floor. For he was a big fellow, and was rather like
Scott's
schoolmaster who, when he knocked young Scott down, apologised,
and
explained that "he didn't know his own strength."
But when he went
into the woods Chum liked an equal to go with, and
I was the man for his
money. He knew my favourite paths through the
woodlands, and flashed hither
and thither to his familiar haunts, his
reddish-brown coat gleaming through
the trees like an oriflamme of Pan,
and his head down to the ground like a
hound on the trail. For there
was more than a hint of the hound in his varied
composition. What he was
precisely no one ever could tell me. Even the
veterinary gave him up.
His fine liquid brown eyes and eloquent eyebrows were
pure Airedale, but
he had a nobler head than any Airedale I have known. There
was a strain
of the Irish terrier in him, too, but the glory of his smooth
ruddy coat
was all his own. And all his own, too, were his honest, simple
heart and
his genius for friendship.
There was no cunning about the
fellow, and I fancy that in dogdom he
was reckoned something of a fool. You
could always tell when he had
been sleeping in the armchair that was
forbidden to him by the look of
grotesque criminality that he wore. For he
had an acute sense of sin,
and he was too ingenuous for concealment. He was
as sentimental as a
schoolgirl, and could put as much emotion into the play
of his wonderful
eyebrows as any actor that ever walked the stage. In
temperament, he was
something of a pacifist. He would strike, but only under
compulsion, and
when he passed the Great Dane down in the valley he was a
spectacle of
abject surrender and slinking humbleness. His self-pity under
pain was
ludicrous, and he exploited it as openly as a beggar exploits his
sores.
You had but to speak sympathetically to him, to show any concern
about
his affliction, whatever it might chance to be, and he would limp off
to
the forbidden armchair with the confidence of a convalescent
entitled
to any good thing that was going. And there he would lie curled up
and
watchful, his eyes blinking with mingled joy at the unaccustomed
luxury
and pity for the misfortune that was the source of that joy. He had
the
qualities of a rather impressionable child. Scold him and he sank
into
an unspeakable abyss of misery; pat him or only change the tone of
your
voice and all the world was young and full of singing birds
again.
He was, I fear, a snob. He had not that haughty aloofness from his
kind,
that suggestion of being someone in particular which afflicts the
Chow.
For him a dog was a dog whatever his pedigree, his coat, his breed,
or
his colour. But in his relations to the human family he revealed
more
than a little of the spirit of the flunkey. "A man's a man, for
a'
that," was not his creed. He discriminated between the people who
came
to the front door and the people who came to the side door. To
the
former he was systematically civil; to the latter he was
frankly
hostile. "The poor in a loomp is bad," was his fixed principle, and
any
one carrying a basket, wearing an apron, clothed in a uniform was
_ipso
facto_ suspect. He held, in short, to the servile philosophy
of
clothes as firmly as any waiter at the Ritz or any footman in
Mayfair.
Familiarity never altered his convictions. No amount of
correction
affected his stubborn dislike of postmen. They offended him in
many
ways. They wore uniforms; they came, nevertheless, to the front
door;
they knocked with a challenging violence that revolted his sense
of
propriety. In the end, the burden of their insults was too much
for
him. He took a sample out of a postman's pair of trousers. Perhaps
that
incident was not unconnected with his passing.
One day he limped
into the garden, dragging his hindlegs painfully.
Whether he had been run
over by a motor-car or had fallen back in
leaping a stile--he could take a
gate with the grace of a swallow--or
had had a crack across the back with a
pole we never knew. Perhaps the
latter, for he had enemies, and I am bound to
say deserved to have them,
for he was a disobedient fellow, and would go
where he was not wanted.
But whatever the cause he just wilted away at the
hindquarters, and all
the veterinary's art was in vain. The magic word that
called him to
the revels in his native woods--for he had come to us as a pup
from a
cottage in the heart of the woodland country--no longer made him
tense
as a drawn bow. He saw the cows in the paddock without indignation,
and
left his bone unregarded. He made one or two efforts to follow me up
the
hill to the woods, but at the corner of the lane turned back, crept
into
the house, and lay under the table as if desiring only to forget and
to
be forgotten. Now he is gone, and I am astonished to find how large
a
place he filled in the circle of my friendships. If the Indian's
dream
of the happy hunting ground is true, I fancy I shall find Chum
there
waiting to scour the woods with me as of old.
[Illustration:
0120]
[Illustration: 0121]
ON MATCHES AND
THINGS
|I had an agreeable assurance this afternoon that the war is over.
I
went-into a tea-shop and sat down. There were several young
waitresses
by the counter engaged in animated conversation. They eyed me with
that
cold aloofness which is the ritual of the order, and which, I
take
it, is intended to convey to you the fact that they are princesses
in
disguise who only serve in shops for a pastime. When I had taken out
my
watch twice with an appearance of ostentatious urgency, one of the
princesses
came towards me, took my order (looking meanwhile out of
the window to remind
me that she was not really aware of me, but only
happened to be there by
chance), and moved languorously away. When she
returned she brought tea--and
sugar. In that moment her disdain was
transfigured. I saw in her a
ministering angel who under the disguise of
indifference went about
scattering benedictions among her customers and
assuring them that the spring
had come back to the earth.
It was not only the princess who was
transfigured. The whole future
became suddenly irradiated. The winter of
discontent (and saccharine)
had passed magically away, and all the poor
remnant of my life would be
sweetened thrice a day by honest
sugar.
Not until that astonishing sugar basin swam into my ken had I
realised
how I loathed the chemical abomination that I had borrowed from
my
friends through long years of abstinence. I am ordinarily a
one-lump
person, but in my exultation I put in two lumps and then I seized
the
spoon and stirred and stirred in an ecstasy of satisfaction. No
longer
did the spoon seem a sardonic reminiscence of happier days, a
mere
survival of an antique and forgotten custom, like the buttons on
the
back of your coat. It resumed its authority in the ordinance of
the
tea-table. To stir your tea is no mean part of a noble ceremony.
It
keeps tune with your thoughts if you are alone, and it keeps time
with
your tongue if you are talking. It helps out the argument, fills
up
the gaps, provides the animated commentary on your discourse. There
are
people I shall always remember in the attitude of standing, cup in
hand,
and stirring, stirring, stirring as the current of talk flowed on.
Such
a one was that fine old tea-drinker, Prince Kropotkin--rest his
gentle
soul if he indeed be among the slain.... With what universal
benevolence
his patriarchal face used to gleam as he stood stirring and
talking,
talking and stirring, with the hurry of his teeming
thoughts.
It is not one's taste for sugar or loathing of saccharine that
accounts
for the pleasure that incident in the tea-shop gave. It is that in
these
little things we feel the return of the warm current to the frozen
veins
of life. It is like the sensation you have when, after days in the
icy
solitudes of the glaciers, you begin to descend to the \alleys and
come
with a shock of delight upon the first blades of grass and later
upon
the grazing cattle on the mountain side, and the singing birds and
all
the pleasant intimacies of the familiar life. They seem more
precious
than you had ever conceived them to be. You go about in these
days
knitting up your severed friendships with things. You slip into
the
National Gallery just to see what old favourites have come up from
the
darkness of the cellars. You walk along the Embankment rejoicing
in
the great moon that shines again from the Clock Tower. Every clock
that
chimes gives you a pleasant emotion, and the boom of Big Ben
sounds
like the salutation of an old friend who had been given up as lost.
And
matches.... There was a time when I thought nothing of a match. I
would
strike a match as thoughtlessly as I would breathe. And for the
same
reason, that matches were as plentiful as air. I would strike a
match
and let the wind puff it out; another and let it burn out before
using
it, simply because I was too busy talking or listening or
thinking
or doing nothing. I would try to light a pipe in a gale of wind on
a
mountain top, crouching behind a boulder, getting inside my hat,
lying
on the ground under my coat, and wasting matches by the dozen. I
would
get rid of a box of matches a day, and not care a dump. The world
was
simply choked with matches, and it was almost a duty to go on
striking
them to make room for the rest. You could get a dozen boxes for a
penny
or twopence, and in the kitchen you could see great bags of matches
with
boxes bursting out at the top, and simply asking to be taken. If by
some
accident you found yourself without a box in your pocket you asked
the
stranger for a light as confidently as you would ask him for the
time
o' day. You were asking for something that cost him nothing except
a
commonplace civility.
And now... I have this very day been into
half-a-dozen shops in Fleet
Street and the Strand and have asked for matches
and been turned empty
away. The shopmen have long ceased to say, "No; we
haven't any." They
simply move their heads from side to side without a word,
slowly,
smilelessly, wearily, sardonically, as though they have got into
the
habit and just go on in their sleep. "Oh, you funny people," they
seem
to say, dreamily. "Will you never learn sense? Will nothing ever
teach
you that there aren't any matches; haven't been any matches for
years
and years; never will be any matches any more? Please go away and
let
the other fools follow on." And you go away, feeling much as though
you
had been caught trying to pass a bad half-crown.
No longer can you
say in the old, easy, careless way, "Can you oblige me
with a light, sir?"
You are reduced to the cunning of a bird of prey or
a pick-pocket. You sit in
the smoking carriage, eyeing the man opposite,
wondering why he is not
smoking, wondering whether he is the sort of
fellow who is likely to have a
match, pretending to read, but waiting
to pounce if there is the least
movement of his hand to his pocket,
preparing to have "After you, sir," on
your lips at the exact moment
when he has lit his cigarette and is screwing
up his mouth to blow out
the precious flame. Perhaps you are lucky. Perhaps
you are not. Perhaps
the fellow is only waiting to pounce too. And thus you
sit, each waiting
for what the other hasn't got, symbols of eternal hope in a
matchless world. |
|
댓글 없음:
댓글 쓰기